Reconfiguring Antiracism: Cyborgs, Response-ability, and Canada's Parliament Hill

Abstract

Antiracism consistently decries its lack of transformative effects, particularly in relation to embodied experiences of racism and the complexity of racist processes and experiences (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Hage, 2016). By contrast, cyborgian theory (Gray, 1996; Haraway, 1991) highlights the cyborg as a powerful resource for an embodied transformative politics that is responsive to the structures and processes of embodied understandings, and to the entanglements of knowledge and being. This thesis theorizes how the cyborg may be operationalized for antiracism specifically. I reconfigure antiracism considering the cyborg through three steps. First, building on my own embodied experience as a white, cisgendered woman, I ground antiracism in a praxis of embodied response-ability (Haraway, 2016) moving from a reactive form of antiracism to an on-going project of engagement. Second, I draw on posthumanist anti-oppressive and feminist theory (e.g., Braidotti, 2011; Thweatt-Bates, 2016) to align antiracism with Donna Haraway’s (1991, 1992, 2016) conceptualization of the cyborg. This alignment refigures antiracism as actively embodied, theoretically grounded, and attentive to relationality and processes of cultural production. Third, I operationalize my theorizing through my embodied engagement with Canada’s parliamentary precinct, Parliament Hill. My diffractive mapping through an antiracism attuned to the cyborg shows how Parliament Hill produces and continues racism through an assemblage of mechanisms of nationalist dominance that actively fortify overt boundaries, network dialectic understandings of identity, and pattern racist relations of belonging and otherness. My analysis reveals how intimately and insidiously racism lives and entangles in knowledge production. It also shows how engaging the world, recognizing the onto-epistemological orientation in posthuman cyborg provides a means for critically living in and with entanglements of embodied racisms that enable a transformative antiracist praxis.